1. Field of the Invention
The invention is directed to television advertisements. Specifically, the invention is directed to measuring television (TV) advertisement (ad or commercial) viewership.
2. Background of the Invention
To generate accurate ad viewership information for all ad types, a client device based Audience Measurement System (AMS), which logs events on a client device, has collect, transport, store, retrieve, and process an amount of data that can easily exceed the capabilities of existing cost-effective systems. For example, for the PayTV industry in the United States (where there are approximately 60 million digital TV subscribers), if each subscriber generates, on average, approximately one hundred events per day, a typical AMS will need to generate, transport, and store approximately six billion events per day. To generate a program or ad rating report, such a system, will have to process the six billion records per day of data for each report. Such an amount of data makes existing AMS systems impractical for monitoring every viewer.
Moreover, considering that a typical linear channel lineup in the US has approximately 300 channels and each hour of broadcasted programming has up to 22 minutes allocated for ad spots (which are typically 30 seconds or less), in all, there are up to 316,800 ad units per day which need to be mapped to about 1,000 socioeconomic, demographic, purchasing, housing, and other profiles.
To date, none of the existing AMS have been created for the PayTV industry, within a reasonable budget, because they have not overcome the limitations caused by the set-top-box return path (i.e. the set-top-box's upstream bandwidth to the head-end), the speed of data retrieval from centralized storage, the cost of CPU data processing to generate the necessary reports, and the time necessary to complete the requested reports (with 316,800 ad units, six billion US records per user per day, and 0.01 millisecond per one comparison, report generation can take up to 602 years to process on a modern computer).